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When Charters Compete

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2012 //
2

I live in New York City, where charters are aggressively expanding. Many, perhaps most, of our charters have hedge fund managers on their board of directors. They want to win. They want higher test scores than the neighborhood public school. They compete with one another and they compete with the neighborhood school.

The city government–which is to say, Mayor Michael Bloomberg–believes in charters. He pushed energetically to get the Legislature to double the number of charters in the city from 100 to 200. In a city with a student enrollment of more than 1 million, the charters enroll a very small proportion, at this point about 5%. Yet you would think by reading the tabloids that they are the only schools that matter.

The charters are very assertive on their own behalf. Whenever there is a public hearing about whether to close a neighborhood public school or a legislative hearing about charters, you can be sure that the charters will bus in hundreds of charter students and parents in identical T-shirts to advocate for more charters or for closing the neighborhood school.

When I see the students and their parents with their placards demanding “more change, faster change,” I have had two reactions. First, if any public school were to spend public money bringing its students and their families to a political event, it would be a major scandal, and the principal would be fired for bad judgment.

My second reaction is to wonder why the students and their parents want more charters. They are already enrolled in a charter. How many schools can one student attend? Are they there because they want everyone to have what they have? Or are they there because the sponsor wants more charters? In other words, are they being used to expand the chain and the power of the board? It is obvious that their presence is highly orchestrated. After one big public meeting, one of the parents dropped the script.

This behavior by the charters is disturbing. It shows the worst traits of corporate America. It’s not about education. It’s about winning, even if winning is at the expense of others.

Others find it problematic, even repulsive, which explains why more and more communities are reacting negatively to charters.

Competition may be the way of the world, but collaboration is the best path for building community and goodwill. Collaboration is also the route to school improvement.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools

A Misleading Poll Question about Closing Schools

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2012 //
8

GothamSchools this morning reports a new poll this morning, which includes a question about Mayor Bloomberg’s policy of closing schools with low test scores.

The poll showed rejection of mayoral control, as is now typical, but the closing-schools question was worded in peculiar fashion. Instead of asking, “Do you approve or disapprove of the mayor’s policy of closing schools” or in some relatively neutral way, the poll posed this alternative:

“Mayor Bloomberg wants to close a number of low performing public schools and replace them. Which comes closer to your point of view; this is good educational policy, or this is an attack on the teacher’s union?”

Now, as a matter of fact, I don’t see the closing-schools policy “as an attack on the teachers’ union.” I see it as part of a privatization and community destablization policy, one that leaves communities feeling hopeless and powerless. In my view, what happens to the union and its member is not a central issue, since its members will get jobs in other schools or get thrown into the make-rolls of Absent Teachers Reserves. Certainly, the policy is not good for the members of the union, but they are collateral damage. The major damage, when a traditional neighborhood school is closed, is to the local community. That’s why thousands of parents and students come out to protest at public hearings. They are not protesting at the behest of the union, they are protesting the loss of an institution that was a central part of their lives.

The closing of a neighborhood school, with its trophy cases and its memories, even the loss of its name, is a dagger into the heart of the community, just one more thread torn away, leaving people without the ties that made them a community.

Please, if anyone knows how to reach the people who construct the Quinniapiac polls at the CT university of that name, please ask them to rephrase the question. They are asking the wrong question.

Diane

P.S. My computer refuses to open the GothamSchools website, so I can’t post a link. Here is the story:

NEWS: Poll: Few NYers see school closures as sound education policy

Posted: 10 May 2012 04:40 AM PDT

Fewer than four in 10 New Yorkers think closing schools makes for sound education policy, according to the results of a new poll released today. And approval is lowest in the borough most hard-hit by school closures under the Bloomberg administration.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University’s survey center, focused largely on 2013 mayoral race and found that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is a clear frontrunner among the Democratic candidates. But it also asked a raft of questions about education policy in the city.

Several of the questions had been asked before and yielded consistent results. New Yorkers still want the next mayor to share school control with an independent board, disapprove in large numbers of how Mayor Bloomberg is handling the city’s schools, and are divided about whether the teachers union exerts a positive force.

But one question had never appeared on a Quinnipiac poll before. It asked, “Mayor Bloomberg wants to close a number of low performing public schools and replace them. Which comes closer to your point of view; this is good educational policy, or this is an attack on the teacher’s union?”

Thirty-eight percent of poll respondents said they thought replacing struggling schools made educational sense. A larger number, 44 percent, said school closures represent an attack on the teacher’s union. Nearly 20 percent said they didn’t know how to answer the question.

The poll results suggest that personal proximity to school closures might breed opposition to the policy. Criticism of closures was highest in families with union members — but also in the Bronx, where closures have broken down almost all of the large high schools that were open a decade ago into small schools. Just a quarter of Bronx respondents said closure made educational sense. In Manhattan, where relatively few families have been affected by closures, support for closure was much higher, at 51 percent. And while 47 percent of respondents with children backed closure as a policy, that number was just 35 percent for parents of public school students.

The poll was conducted May 3-8, shortly after the city school board had approved the latest crop of closures, for 24 schools that would undergo a federally prescribed process known as “turnaround.” The UFT filed suit May 7 to halt turnaround, arguing that the atypical replacement plans don’t amount to closure at all.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC, Opinion Polling

The Shame of “School Reform” in New York City

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2012 //
8

Once again, a large group of New York City public schools will close their doors, their staffs will be fired and replaced, and new schools will open. Among the schools that will be closed are Flushing High School, reputed to be the oldest school in the city, and John Dewey High School, once highly regarded for its progressivism but now burdened by a steady influx of low-performing students. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/26/with-panel-vote-once-venerable-city-schools-will-close/).

Some schools were saved by last-minute expressions of interest by the Borough President of Queens, Helen Marshall, and the chair of the State Assembly Education Committee, Cathy Nolan, which apparently sufficed to save Grover Cleveland High School in their borough.

As the closing of “failing” schools becomes an annual ritual, along with the opening of brand-new schools (some of which will eventually join the ranks of “failing” schools), it is time to ask about where accountability truly lies.

I wonder if  it ever occurs to anyone in the New York City Department of Education that their own policies of closing schools and shuffling low-performing students around like checker pieces on a checker board have actually created “failing” schools. Every time they close a large high school with large numbers of low-performing students, those students are then pushed off into another large high school (like Dewey) that is doomed to “fail.”

Why doesn’t the leadership of the DOE ever take responsibility for helping schools that have disproportionate numbers of students who enter ninth grade with low test scores, including students with disabilities, homeless students, and students who are English language learners? Their methods of “reform” look like 52-pickup: Just throw the cards in the air and hope that somehow you come up with a winning hand.

Instead of providing resources, technical support, extra staff, or whatever the school needs to help students, the DOE declares that the school is “failing.”

Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. His reforms were put in place in September 2003. We are now in the ninth year of mayoral control with no checks or balances. The students in the “failing” schools started school when the Mayor was in charge. At what point can we say that the Mayor’s reforms have worked? Every time a school fails, the responsibility and accountability belong to the New York City Department of Education, which proves each time that it has no idea how to help schools improve.

No wonder that New York City voters (and public school parents) expressed their dissatisfaction with the Mayor’s policies in the latest poll. New Yorkers are tired of the parade of school closings and openings. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/24/poll-new-yorkers-want-new-city-school-policies-from-next-mayor/)

Accountability starts at the top. If school officials don’t know how to help schools, they should get out of the way and stop wrecking what is left of the public school system.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC

How stupid items get onto standardized tests

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2012 //
23

Many people have wondered how the New York State Education Department permitted the nonsensical story about the pineapple and the hare to get onto the state test.

This is not the first time a really bad reading passage got onto the test and it won’t be the last.

State Commissioner John King was quick to issue a defensive statement saying that people were reading the story “out of context,” as if the full story made sense (it didn’t). And he was quick to pin the blame on teachers, who supposedly had reviewed all the test items. It was the teachers’ fault, not his. In an era where Accountability is the hallmark of education policy, King was quick to refuse any accountability for what happened on his watch. These days, the ones at the top never accept accountability for what goes wrong, that’s for the “little people” like teachers and students, not for the bigwigs. No one holds them accountable, and they never accept any. None of them ever says, as President Harry S Truman did, “the buck stops here.”

So this is the reason that even a stupid, pointless story like the pineapple story–so thoroughly bowdlerized that it was disowned by Daniel Pinkwater, its original author–got past the review panel. I know about this process because I spent seven years as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board and served on a committee where we read every single question that would appear on a national test. When the review committee gets the items, with questions and answers, you are told that this particular item has been thoroughly field-tested. It has appeared in a children’s magazine; it has been used in a state assessment. Here are the results with all the accompanying statistics for this item. You are also told that the publisher’s own technical reviewers approved the item; so did the publisher’s bias and sensitivity reviewers.

By the time the item reaches the teachers or external panel, it has been vetted, you are told, by many others. There is tremendous implicit pressure to go along with the judgment of others whom you assume are very professional. They all agreed it was fine. Who are you to raise a question or complaint?

Since I am by nature a skeptic, I always read test passage and their questions and answers as if no one  else had. And on more occasions than I can count, I said, “Stop. Wait. This doesn’t make sense. The question isn’t clear. None of the answers fits the question. There are two good answers,” or words to that effect.

But I  understand the social pressure, the social consensus, that discourages questioning and criticism.

And that is how bad questions get onto standardized tests, and why the Pineapple question was not the first and will certainly not be the last to slip past the review panels.

The best remedy for this problem is to publish the questions and answers when the tests are finished. That way, everyone can see them. After all, as Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo and Secretary Duncan often remind us, when speaking of teacher evaluation ratings, “The public has a right to know.”

Since the tests are the linchpin of every national education policy today, the public has a right to know if the tests are fair, valid, reliable and reasonable ways to assess student learning.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, Duncan, Arne, Testing
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